Weight Loss and Exercise

I saw this story and thought that the author's conclusions rather echoed the conclusion I've drawn after researching exercise and caloric intake after my surgery. As a matter of fact, I posted a comment to the Weighty Matters blog about it!

I probably had said it before, but basically, exercise simply isn't a great way to maintain weight loss. It's good for you and does great things for the body but for weight maintenance, it simply isn't a panacea.

First, people tend to reward themselves for working out. "I was good!" they say. "I exercised, sweated a lot, I can afford this donut..." or extra bit of pie or extra slice of pizza, whatever you want to stick in there as a treat. I'm sure there are plenty of people who go to the gym and not indulge, but there are plenty of average people who do.

Second, have you looked realistically at the amount of calories you burn versus what's in a cheeseburger? Walking for a couple hours at a decent pace will burn out a plain cheeseburger of 300 calories. If you wanted to work off the average American's meal, you'd be in the gym for four or five hours doing moderate work. That's a LOT of exercising, a lot of time, so if you don't get exercise in as part of your job (as in you're a professional weight lifter or aerobics instructor of something of that caliber), good luck with your exercise routine making a huge dent in your weight.

Third, I don't know about you, but I'm a creature of routine. Knock me out of my routine, and I will fall right off the wagon. I'm terrible about this. I like biking, but if I can't go out (like when it's snowing out, or raining, etc.) I can't do it on a regular basis, and that is exercise I can't do on a regular basis. Walking? When I can, but it's still not something I routinely fit in. Even going to the gym got to be a hassle as I was annoyed by some of the other people there.

Overall I've found, from my reading, my research, and experiences, that the best way to control weight is to play with your caloric intake. You don't need to work off calories that you don't eat in the first place.

For exercise, I do try to walk more; I don't mind parking a little farther away in the parking lot. I don't mind taking the stairs. I don't mind having to walk around a building, or walking to a destination when it won't take too long. But I don't do exercise to rely on weight maintenance anymore, and anyone pushing it as a weight-control item instead of just being beneficial for your health (your bones, you heart, etc.) is fooling you.

Christmas is a Time for Treating

Merry Xmas, Happy Holidays, etc. etc...we all know the season and the stores remind us of the reason at every opportunity. It's to overeat and indulge, right?

Well, that's what one aspect of the holiday has become. My indulgence today is to not do my weigh-in, meaning I'll do my next one on Monday. I don't need to be reminded that I'm stuck in a plateau...Merry Christmas to me!

People with the Roux-en-Y surgery...and I suspect Lap-Banding...can't really "indulge" in the way that other people do. Loosening the belt just doesn't allow us to stuff in another helping of ham or stuffing.

The bad part is that we may want to still eat the way we used to; it's a head hunger and habit. It's also bad because eating is a social bonding experience. Families equate eating with social bonding. So while the bari post-op has finished his or her small portion (actually closer to a "real portion") of food on the mini-plate, everyone else is going back for seconds or thirds.

This is a tough time for post-ops. This is my first Xmas without being able to indulge...I'm rapidly approaching one year since starting my dieting program. And in some ways it kind of sucks; I'm the type of person that just isn't happy with having a thumbnail portion of each item available, so I have my meals that I tend to stick with.

On the plus side, the reduced stomach size helps warn you when you've eaten too much. I get this half-uncomfortable blah feeling that signals that it's time to stop ingesting. Now, this can be "beaten" by just eating slowly over time, or overeating by taking many small snacks that add up the calories.

In the end losing weight comes down to calories. Eat less, lose weight. The holiday treat time is to find the one or two things you really really enjoy and have a portion of it. As long as it doesn't have sugar as a primary ingredient (a coworker makes the best fudge, and I couldn't have it this year because I would get sick as a dog if I did...I also learned that the chai at Sam's Club has sugar as a first ingredient, and it did indeed make me sick, even though most other chai teas don't).

Hopefully other post-ops are doing well with their diet efforts over the holiday season. Everyone else is probably indulging as usual and then will swear off foods until New Year's rolls around, then will make their annual promises to lose X amount of pounds. And the cycle continues...have fun!

Maintenance

I had the surgery 8 months ago. Doesn't seem that way...seems like a distant memory.

I was told that the surgery's effects will continue for a year to 18 months down the road. But seeing as it's the holidays...which can be a trying time for nerves as well as stomachs...I thought I'd reflect a little on the current state of maintenance.

As a note, I've lost about 190 pounds total. That was including the pre-surgery mandatory weight loss (the irony is still not lost on me). But for the past week or two I've been fighting a mean plateau that keeps me in the 265 pound range. The bad news is...still obese. The really bad news is...it's enough of a weight loss that I have a lot of sagging skin, making me feel like a basset hound and keeping me embarrassed enough to not show my arms (and stomach, but I normally don't show that off anyway) in public.

I keep to the same diet I've had for the most part. The big change I recently made was to cut most of my peanut butter consumption. See, I have a couple food vices, which have changed over time a little. For example I loved soft drinks. Diet Pepsi, diet orange soda, etc...the doctor said I couldn't have it anymore. Not if I had the surgery. No bubbly stuff.

Begrudgingly I gave them up.

Mini donuts and brownies? Rich, think, cakey brownies? Gone. Pumpkin pie? Gone.

Even my Chef Boyardee I last had as a puree' shortly after the surgery...not since.

Jiminy jilikers. This is getting depressing.

Two things I didn't really give up; cheese, and peanut butter.

The problem is that I slide the slippery slope. I liked peanut butter. I indulged in peanut butter. I had too much peanut butter. It's a high calorie "slider food" that when not careful will add to weight. I wondered if that contributed to my plateau.

So now I have salsa on my broccoli instead of PB.

Let me tell you I preferred it a LOT more the other way. But hey...if it means taking off more pounds, I need to cut back on it. I have a taste on a piece of it or two and that's it. But in the afternoon, I have a little bowl of broccoli with salsa.

Snacking? Yeah, I do that. Apples and bananas. More expensive, unfortunately, but it is more healthy and relatively lower in calories.

Cheese? I have 2% cheese. A couple slices on my meals. That comes to 100 calories per meal. When I look at my pre-packed lunch/breakfast/dinner, I have a tortilla from Azteca (190 calories), cheese (100 calories total), plus a couple slices of thin-shaved meat (turkey or ham) and either some tomato sauce or salad dressing rolled up with a little bit of mushroom to add bulk. So I'd roughly estimate...350 to 400 calories? 1200 a day from meals? Plus my apples and bananas I wouldn't be too surprised at a 1500 calorie to 1600 calorie day. I don't think that's horrible, but I'll have to wait and see what happens with the plateau now that I've cut out 90% of my PB intake.

I still exercise to cut (according to the computers) 300 to 500 calories or so. I haven't been to the gym as much lately; I have tried making up for it on my recumbent bike. I've had a lot of other things to do with the holidays and family and whatnot, so it's just been a pain, especially as the weather gets colder, I'm learning the ropes of a coal stove for the first time, and it's freakin' dark by the time I get home from work, making it harder to get my butt out there. Excuses? Yes, I know, but to a degree justified. If it were a top priority these excuses wouldn't stop me.

The truth is that I have trouble finding the motivation to go. I don't have a trainer. It's not exactly a bit hurrah to go to the gym; it's not a rockin' place. It's hot, sweaty, and I'm never sure if I'm doing anything right with the freeweights.

Pain. In. The. Butt.

That said, I do still go. It's just more of a drag for me than when it was sunnier during the late afternoon.

So that's my progress with maintenance. Stuck in a plateau, depressed at the holidays and riding a recumbent as I type this, about to check once more if the coal stove is getting up to temp after having to refill the coal bed. Quick note to self...coal fires really like big deep red-hot coal beds. Let it get too thinned out and it'll die quickly, heat and firewise. And that sucks.

Until next time...feel free to share your dieting stories for maintenance and challenges to that weight!

Movie Theater Snacks

The diet-blog had a quick blurb about a study from the Center for Science in the Public Interest that states that (are you sitting for this news? Of course you are, you're reading a blog entry...) theater snacks are not healthy.

I know, it's shocking.

Basically the study drew one comparison thus: could you stomach three McDonald's quarter pounders and 12 pats of butter?

That's what you get with a medium popcorn and soda combo from Regal. At least, nutritionally they're approximately equivalent in calories and fat. ~1,600 calories and 60 grams of saturated fat.

Before my surgery I'd have had to ask if those quarter pounders had cheese or not...ha!

Anyway, this caught my attention because I recently sat through that 2-hour comedy "Twilight" with my step daughter and her friends, so movie stuff with the food angle catch my attention since I'm always reminded of the food habits I've given up since my surgery. Nowadays, not too surprised that one movie is filling you with most of your daily calorie requirements.

Of course I don't get much at the theater anymore. I've had a few of the pretzel bites from a larger theater when we've gone; a few of them aren't too bad, I can't eat more than four or five of the bits, and we rarely ever go (I think it's been months since the last movie we saw as a family, I can't remember which one it was) so having a couple of the pretzel bites are a treat. But going to the theater is just too expensive. The article noted that the combo costs $12, and it's really no secret that you're paying a premium for food that is Sam's Club-econosized with a hiked up price when you eat at the theater. Theaters make their money from snacks and then they whine when profits go down as people can barely afford the tickets, let alone the three dollar water.

Back to the point...today, I rarely go to the theater. When I do go, normally the only thing I have in my stomach is bottled water. Food there is overpriced and calorie heavy, and I try giving myself some solace in that fact when I mourn that I cannot have these things anymore (I absolutely loved Reeses Pieces or Twizzlers when I used to go to movies).

I know...it's a heretical thing to suggest, going to the movies without buying a tub of 'corn and the candy and the so-big-small-children-can-drown-in-it soda. It's part of the theater experience. Unfortunately it's also a reason that theater seats are rubbing our thighs while trying to watch two hours of sparkly vampires.

I guess my stance is that I've had to adapt to not getting all those fun things at the theater when I do end up going. Miss it sometimes, so maybe it's retroactive justification, but you do what you have to do. Anyone else change eating habits in light of economy or nutrition information about theater foods, or do you continue with what you've always done?

Calories and Obesity

I've said before that losing weight...or anything to do with weight, really...is a matter of calories in and calories out. Eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. Burn more calories than you eat, you lose weight. Pretty simple once you average everything out.

The diet-blog just had a posting that strikes me as one of those "Well, duh..." moments.

Some researchers apparently tried to figure out what we should weigh if obesity is tied to overeating alone, not activity level. Seems that the logistics were fairly simple.

Choose a time in the past where obesity wasn't considered an epidemic and we have data on eating habits of the population. In this study, it was the 1970's.

Next figure out how many calories you need to live. Another term for that is BMR, or basal metabolic rate, although it's not mentioned in the article.

Then compare food data of consumption by the population, average it out, and figure out how much people would gain at those calorie levels. The conclusion?

From the article:
Comparing the theoretical and actual figures demonstrated that children's weights had increased by exactly what would be expected from the increased food intake alone. Adults had put on slightly less weight than the extra food would have indicated (8.6 kilos heavier instead of 10.8). 

That would imply that people have, on average, been slightly more active than in the past. We're simply eating too damn much.

How? This isn't in the study but based on anecdotal evidence, I'd venture a guess that our food today tends to be more processed and in larger portions. Processed and pre-made stuff is often loaded with sugars, fats, and sodium to enhance flavors and textures. Couple this with an increased average portion size and it all adds up.

As crass as it sounds, the reason we're fat is because we eat too much. I've seen more blurbs on exercise (and tried doing the math as well) that shows that exercise alone, while a boost in health benefits, isn't a diet plan. When you have to work out an hour to get rid of a plain McDonald's cheeseburger, you'd have to dedicate hours of work, hours most people spend doing things like getting a paycheck, to burn off that extra helping of dinner before dessert and the cheesecake you had to have at Starbuck's yesterday. Or even to make a dent in the one meal you had at Applebee's.

People will hammer home that exercise increases your metabolism for longer time afterwards, that when you eat affects how much is burned, etc etc...do some research on calories and calorie burn and BMR. Start doing the math. While not exact and there are variables, the average will level out to show that really the biggest influence is how much you put in your mouth.

Ten minutes with a burger, or an hour on the treadmill? Which do you think would save you more time for the calories?

Holiday Eating

Happy Thanksgiving, US residents!

Holidays are here, and with it another reason to overeat. Holidays are tough. For those of us having to adjust to new portion sizes, holidays are no longer the excuse to overeat that they used to be. Normals splurge occasionally and because of their lifestyles, the weight evens out. If post-ops overeat, we're talking pain, quick visits to the toilet, or violent retching. Not fun.

I'm spending time with my in-laws and my parents (as well as my own family, of course). We're all packing into a van and heading to my parents house for a turkey and the trimmings.

I'm well aware that we're supposed to be able to eat "normal" food, with the exception of maybe the pumpkin pie, as long as it's in moderation. I don't like that because I simply suck at estimating portion sizes. As a result, I'm sticking to my original plan; I'm taking a tortilla and some turkey slices and I'll stuff it with some stuffing. A Thanksgiving Wrap, so to speak. If I find some sweet potato maybe I'll put that into the wrap too. I've found that the wrap is pretty good for making acting as a natural portion limiter. I'm sure it'll draw some ire from those around me because it's not traditional. I'm used to the looks and the dirty thoughts. I try not to let it bother me anymore. I'm doing this because I know what works for me. If I start partaking in the old ways, I just know that I'll gradually slip into overeating again. I don't want to worry about that.

New foods? I still have to be careful. It appears that even innocent things like trying a small Sam's Club sample of chai and a bite of a glazed ham slice on a toothpick was enough to trigger digestive upset (I noticed after the fact that the chai mix at Sam's Club had sugar as a primary ingredient...surprise!). So mixing up foods at a family event is not something I really feel like experimenting with.

The point is that holidays are hugely focused on eating as part of the ritual, and for some people it's a really bad idea. These type of holiday events encourage overeating. Normals may not have a problem with this. Some people like me will have to stick to our guns even if it means looking weird at the table eating prepared foods. I've worked too hard and suffered too much to give up now just because it upsets someone who doesn't walk in my shoes and wear my floppy excess skin.

Good luck to any post-op reading this, I bid you the best in getting through the holiday time. Find something to be thankful for to get you through these wonderful family gatherings without wanting to curl up in the corner and cry. If you can't, at least be courteous enough to stay out of my corner...

Slider Foods

Lee had mentioned slider foods recently. I don't have the reference handy or I'd link here, but I remember him mentioning that it was a new concept to him.

I haven't really thought about it, but I knew about them. Slider foods hold a special place for bariatric patients. Basically they're foods that go through the pouch pretty quickly and with little digestive effort; they go down and through easily, with very little side effects for us. Well, for the most part.

Example slider foods: pudding, yogurt, cottage cheese...you get the idea.

I've been having a half-slider food. I love having broccoli with peanut butter. It's an odd combination (but don't knock it until you try it!). Peanut butter is healthy in many ways, but probably is a slider food because of its consistency and texture.

Unfortunately, it's yummy, and high in calories. As are most slider foods. That's why they're special for bariatric patients...it's a way to cheat the diet. These foods slide through the pouch without necessarily making the post-op feeling full.

If you're lucky, you still get the negative reinforcement of a dumping effect depending on the food. If you're foolish enough to have pudding that's not sugar-free or eating sugared ice cream...there better be a clear path to the restroom. I'll leave the rest to your imagination.

I've had to watch my peanut butter obsession. Lately I've been plateaued...is it biological? Metabolic adjustment? The peanut butter obsession? I don't know, but I do know that if I start sliding the wrong way on the scale for over a week then I need to make drastic changes. As it stands I'm trying to slowly adjust my PB&Broccoli obsession to reduce caloric intake more.

So that's the skinny on slider foods. Apparently there are bariatric patients that either don't know about them or forget. They're quick calories that don't tend to stretch the stomach and usually taste sooooo good! A little is usually okay. After all...for weight loss, calories are king. So keep an eye on calories and you should be fine. Unless it has sugar. Ew.

Burgers and Donuts?

There are times when I miss being able to indulge in oddball foods. Take a look at this Donut Burger.

I know...disgusting, isn't it? It's only 1,500 calories. A bacon cheeseburger with a glazed donut instead of a bun. I'm repulsed and intrigued at the same time.

Alas...trying it could have repercussions with my modified stomach, so I'm forced to admire the photograph and not try it in real life.

The web site "This Is Why You're Fat" has all sorts of food that I have, at times, wondered if their concoctions taste good or not. Most of the items photographed are things that I think would have been right at home in my stomach during my college years.

One thing featured recently was Velveeta Fudge. As it happened I talked to a coworker who actually HAD that. He said that if you weren't told it was cheese fudge you'd never had known. Apparently the fudgy sugar mix was enough that you don't taste the cheese. That made me all the more curious.

I don't remember coming up with any really "weird" food combinations, although there are people who are repulsed that I put ketchup on eggs and mashed potatoes. Two separate dishes. I don't put all three together at the same time.

What's the weirdest food combination you put together? Anything adventurous?

Food Workers Spitting in Your Food?

I was reading an article about being choosy about the restaurants you visit. The author had been on the receiving end of food poisoning. The gist of the article can be summed up thusly: If the bathroom is dirty, the kitchen is most likely filthy as well. Leave. Quickly. Or risk having a big plate of contaminated food.

On the surface this is just good advice. Heed the advice and you can feel better knowing that the Red Lobster you're eating in is probably not going to give you food poisoning. Or at least the chances are no worse than they would have been if you made the meal in your own kitchen.

But coincidentally I ran into this link regarding restaurant safety as well. The information in it was not pleasant to read. I hope the link is still good if you decide to read it.

For some extra information on that link, it goes to a site called Reddit. It's a site where you normally find websites linked to and commented on; different user vote stories up or down based on how much the enjoyed or hated the story. If something is big and full of buzz, it's normally at the top of Reddit.

But there's also a number of "comment" posts that people can enter, where they ask questions or ask for advice. If it's voted high enough it travels up the list to the top and other people find it and it draws more comments. That link was one of them asking whether people in the restaurant industry have or know of people spitting in the food.

The comments are...well, disconcerting. The concensus seemed to be (at the time I read it, which is a disclaimer since the questions can be edited and altered as long as the story exists on the site) that it does happen, primarily to customers that were real pricks to the staff. It wasn't a common everyday occurrence but it happens.

And there were cases where some employees just did it to do it.

Spitting in food. Stirring drinks with male anatomy.

Some said there were non-"dirty things" that were standard procedure with many restaurants and could make your skin crawl. Example: dropped chicken wings on the floor, the cook scooped them back up and dropped them in the fryer. "The dirt and bacteria are all cleaned off by the heat". I remember seeing that in a documentary about a restaurant, so I know that the comment isn't all that far-fetched.

Thinking about it is one of those things that gives me the heebie jeebies. I won't be able to go into a restaurant or fast food joint without thinking about it.

There are many things we ignore or conveniently tuck away into the recesses of our minds because the "truth" is rather disconcerting and uncomfortable. Examples: where your hamburger comes from. The truth behind the top one percent of the population having eighty percent of the wealth. The odds of you actually winning at the casino or lottery (probably not all that different from each other). Even the number of people that die every day on the streets in car accidents, or the number of people that are driving while distracted by their cell phones, texting, or reading a freakin' newspaper behind the wheel.

So how are you supposed to react? Shun all the things that a modern society gives us because of the risks associated with using these conveniences? Or just file these things away and suspend the knowledge that these things are happening?

Milk; It Does a Body Good, but Not That Good

Interesting post in the Weighty Matters blog post about the milk industry's claims regarding milk and the ability for it to help you lose weight.

I've heard the claims about milk helping you to lose weight. It was another one of those "read it a few times and filed it away" things I do.

The thing is that milk, like any other large industry (oil, restaurants, tobacco, corn,...anyone with a lobbying group wooing your congressional representatives) has their own media spinners working hard to get you, Joe Sixpack, to know just enough to associate their lobby interest with rainbows and gummi bears when you hear about their interest. They spend a lot of money on public relations companies. to get their message out there to influence you.

And it works. After all, I just said that I had heard about milk=weight loss. I don't know the mechanics, but I've heard it. They took some one-off research and turned it into a sound bite for public consumption.

The thing is that I've been stuck in the weight-loss treadmill long enough that when I look at this I see the whole thing for what it is. A sound bite for advertising their product.

As I've said before there is no magic bullet for weight loss. If drinking vitamin Yellow 13 made weight melt off or swallowing tapeworms would allow us to eat whole pizzas and maintain a perfect figure we wouldn't have an American continent that is slowly sinking into the ocean under the weight of its inhabitants. Okay, it's not really doing that. But you get the point.

Weight loss is simple in idea. Calories in greater than calories out, you store them as fat. Calories in less than calories out, you lose weight. Day to day weight varies with water retention, salt intake, biomatter in your digestive tract, etc. but averages out to your rough body weight. Weight loss "systems", if analyzed, are really just screwing with your short term caloric intake (for the most part) or giving you some "tool" for cutting down your caloric intake without thinking of those dirty words "caloric intake".

Summary: you eat too much.

Milk has fat and calories in addition to good minerals. It's not a "bad" food. The fat in it probably screws with your satiety level so you might feel fuller than you normally do, then you don't necessarily eat as much for the meal...that's possible. Fat does that. Real fat makes you feel more full so if you happen to be one of the tiny percentage of people that pay attention to how the stomach feels instead of how full the plate is then you shave 20 calories off the meal.

Is that a dramatic enough difference to justify saying it's a diet miracle food? I don't think so. I've heard similar claims about vegetables, soups, and spicy food. It still doesn't negate the fact that these things have calories and people are mostly fat out of habits, not "good food vs. bad food." These claims have a teeny tiny kernel of truth that makes the claims just good enough that you can't sue their cheerleaders paying the PR firms to tell you about them.

I'll start believing these claims when I can eat their wonderfood and then a whole pizza for a week straight and not gain any weight. Otherwise it's just another miracle cure magic bullet packaged for public consumption.

Exercise Alone Doesn't Help You Lose Weight?

It seems that there is more research buzz pointing in the direction that exercise isn't as big a factor in losing weight as people are led to believe.

The first time this splashed on my radar was from this article in Time Magazine. The author was getting virtually speared online by various pundits and squawkers for suggesting that exercise wasn't a panacea in weight loss, and worse, may actually contribute to weight gain (I exercised a lot today, so I deserve this donut!)

So you can imagine my surprise when I found this article on the diet blog saying that exercise alone won't help you lose weight. Funny enough this article references the Time article, but goes on to cite other recent work that indicates that exercise is a marginal influence on weight compared to your diet.

I've suspected this for awhile. It's not just the BS that gets spread around by gym rats like, "You're heavier because muscle weighs more than fat!" and evidently forgetting that a pound is a pound, no matter what you're weighing, and that in order to actually gain muscle a person has to be eating a surplus of calories to gain building material in the body from which to build more muscle.

I also suspected it when I found out that fat burns only about four to six calories less than muscle per pound. If you replace five pounds of fat with muscle, your body will metabolize only 30 more calories a day at rest. That's a slice of 2% cheese. I vaguely remember having touched on the topic before.

And remember, to build muscle you need to increase your intake of food. Food fuels you but it is also the supply of building material from which your body grows and repairs itself. That means you need to monitor your calorie burning while exercising to make sure you don't have a surplus in calories leading to weight gain, which in my case would be counter productive!

I suspected exercise wasn't a huge key in weight loss again when I found that walking an hour on the treadmill at between 3 and 4 miles per hour would usually lead to an estimated calorie burn of approximately one McDonald's cheeseburger. Not the meal. The burger. Plain cheeseburger (which is 300 calories, by the way). This isn't much of a dent when people snarf double cheeseburgers in two's.

One hour on the treadmill and all I can get for it is a single cheeseburger? Ouch.

Of course some of the gym rats will say things like, "Exercise revs up the metabolism for an hour or two after you exercise, so you lose weight that way too!", or, "building more muscle means burning more calories even at rest!"

Which may be true. But driving your car speeds up the erosion on it's paint and metal on the fenders due to friction with the air and bugs and pebbles that bounce off it while speeding down the road. It's technically true. Just as wind and weather wear away at rocks over time, you're speeding up these same effects on your car to some degree by driving it, since it's like having a constant 45 to 65 mile per hour wind with rocks and bugs hurling into the surface of the vehicle, thus eroding it away. Yet it's not enough of a significant impact to warrant serious concern.

It's about time for an attitude shift in exercise from health fanatics. This evidence is pointing to the need for primarily altering your eating habits, and exercise would just augment this change. None of these articles are saying you shouldn't exercise; to the contrary, they say that exercise has other benefits, while weight loss isn't really one of them. It's still well known that exercise reduces osteoporosis risk as we age. It helps with balance. It does contribute to weight loss to a small degree (although you wipe this out if you celebrate your dedications to the gym with going out for a slice of pie at that local ice cream shop.) Exercise helps your heart and keeps you fit. I'm told it improves your mood as well but I've yet to experience that.

Being active helps you with weight maintenance. But it is an adjunct to adopting better, more reasonable eating habits. Maybe even from schools; I don't recall having a class that focused on telling you that the typical American diet had you eating like a chemical-laden pig, but I do remember wondering what the point of "phys ed" was (oh boy! I get to play a sport that I can't stand watching on TV...oh boy...yeah...not fun.)

Think about it. In an hour at the gym the average person burns up what, 300 to 500 calories? Roughly? Maybe 600. That, for the average person, is the calories in one or two snacks. A snack bar is roughly 300 calories. Some go as high as 500. So your hour in the gym may have bought you a five-minute snack. It doesn't even cover a "full" breakfast at a fast food joint.

And if you're trying to lose weight it's the calories that count.

3500 calories over your burned calorie count is a pound of fat. That means cutting back 500 calories from your diet each day will result in losing a pound over the course of a week. Or every two weeks if you cut back 250 calories per day. When you look at bread and see that a couple slices amount to 100 calories or that your average slice of whole-milk cheese is 100 calories than you can see that trimming your calorie intake here and there can have a bigger effect than jamming more exercise into your schedule, especially when in real-world activities fewer people visit the gym each day and keep up sacrificing their time to hang at the gym and of those gym-goers there's apparently a healthy number that like "treating" themselves to an ice cream cone or extra slice of pizza because they were good about going to the gym.

How about you? Have you noticed a significant impact from exercise on your weight? Or have you noticed that eating less has a bigger impact on yoru weight?

The Cookie Diet

The New York Times had an article about a "Cookie Diet". The premise is pretty simple; you subscribe to a diet program where you get a certain number of little cookies for breakfast and lunch each day, and you pair those up with a "sensible dinner".

The doctor that started the program in 1975 has since started a website called cookiediet.com to sell his cookies in addition to selling them through stores like GNC and Walgreens.

It's just another system, put into a different perspective. The six cookies are roughly 800 calories; you have a light dinner, adding another 500 calories at most, and you end up with about 1200 calories for the day.

When you consider how many calories overweight people are probably taking in on average then it's a no-brainer that they'll lose weight on a 1200 calorie a day diet.

The doctor also sprinkles in some woo-ery in the form of "special ingredients" for protein and health (from his website: "Dr. Siegal’s foods contain his proprietary amino acid mixture that results from the blending of various protein food substances. They satisfy hunger without drugs and help you stick to a reduced-calorie diet.")

Take a step back and strip away the flowery talk; it's a reduced calorie diet.

Would it work? Stick with the program, sure, I don't see why not. You'll also lose weight by not eating a lot, which is essentially what this is.

What if you change this system a little? Say, encourage people to use a system where you assign points to portions of different foods, then sell charts, books, guides, and pre-packaged portions of food with your program's seal on it so people can eat healthy portions without thinking about portion sizes? That would be a sneaky way of getting people to eat fewer calories and lose weight. I'd probably call something like that...I don't know...Weight Watchers sounds good.

The key is the same as others in the field have said, once they strip away the flowery language and other BS. Eat less. Find a system of lifestyle you can live with. Weight Watchers does it by giving a simple point system for people to track and makes a metric crapload of money on the books and guides and foods carrying their logos. Other systems do it with "simple rules" that on one level are easy to follow (don't eat carbs!) but under the surface strip out a large number of calories from your diet (do you know how many calories are in common carbohydrates, especially if your favorite foods are pasta and bread?)

Is it healthy? I'm not a nutritionist. I've read countless times that these system diets usually mean having to supplement with vitamins or increasing certain food types you normally don't such as vegetables in order to make sure you don't have deficits. Others require monitoring or checkups to check your mineral levels in your blood. Generally speaking it's probably not a good idea to cut something out entirely from your diet; your body does require cholesterol and fats along with amounts of all the other things that various fad and gimmick diets vilify.

Antioxidants May be BAD for Diabetics?

Here's a diet-blog post about the effects of antioxidants on diabetics. Turns out it may be a bad thing to take antioxidant vitamins to help your diabetes symptoms!

The effect isn't huge; the best thing to do for diabetes is control your diet and lose weight, the things that have been repeated ad-nauseum for years. I thought it was worth mentioning this because the whole "antioxidant" movement is so popular while not really being supported with proper studies. More often than not any magic-bullet solutions make me pause and think that maybe that bullet is two parts bullet and eight parts manure.

Even the study seems to point to evidence that as a risk to diabetics taking antioxidants isn't exactly going to hurt all that much. It sounds more like it's a slight detriment. Stick to what your doctor advises...lose the weight, cut the smoking, get exercise, and watch what you're eating.

Smart Choices Food Labels are Crap...

Here is a quick story on the diet-blog.com regarding the "Smart Choices" food label system. If you hadn't noticed it, the Smart Choices program was started in 2009 by a coalition of food makers as a way to promote "healthier eating" using a quick checkmark label on the packaging that specifies the calories per serving and how many servings are in each package. Plus the big checkmark draws attention to the product as being better than, say, serving your children a bucket of lard.

Oddly enough there were concerns raised about the program when, for example, the "Smart Choices" label appeared on boxes of food like Froot Loops. How was it possible that a sugary breakfast cereal was a "smart choice" for your kids?

Easy. According to the second diet-blog entry linked just above:
*****
The program's guidelines mean that if a product meets certain criteria, and doesn't exceed the limits for others, it can have the label. In the case of Froot Loops, the cereal meets the standards for Vitamins A and C and for fiber content, and comes within the limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains 12 grams of sugar per serving, the maximum allowed--but, this is 41% of the product, by weight.
*****

To sum it up, the industry is expecting the consumer to sit down and do a critical analysis of everything they're pulling off the shelf before buying their four year old's favorite gotta-have food they saw on the TV during their favorite cartoon.

It's fairly well known that people prefer to outsource thinking to others they believe to hold authority in topics the individual doesn't necessarily have any interest in pursuing themselves. How many average consumers know anything about nutrition beyond the latest news blurb on Fox News?

So when a food item has some sort of label on it that looks like it came from a third party verifying that it's healthy, it gives the consumer a warm fuzzy feeling that they're not doing something all that bad when they buy food better suited to the garbage bin then their gullet.

Most don't stop to question things like, 120 calories per serving? How big is the serving? Or 9 servings in the package, but how big is the package?

It takes actual research to find out just how a program like the Smart Choices program is actually good on the surface but distorted just right to allow the sponsor's agendas to be met.

It doesn't take a lot of common sense to know that Froot Loops aren't something that will keep your body well fueled and in good repair. You don't associate Cocoa Crispies as being a staple in a healthy weightlifter's diet, and you'd have to have lived under a rock to not know that these foods are usually associated with being processed flour and sugar and possessing very little in the way of nutritional value.

But still...these aren't what shoppers are thinking of when they're actually at the supermarket. And the food makers know it. They take advantage of our intellectual laziness, our human nature, while at the same time skirting regulations and social responsibility. They wanted to have something to hold up to the government and say, "See? We're doing a good thing! You don't need to regulate us!"


I have no illusions that consumers will start taking responsibility for what they're doing, nor will they start educating themselves to separate the fact from fiction from distortions that gray the line between the two. We live in a complicated world with too many groups and businesses looking out for themselves at the expense of the consumer.

Fortunately with the rise of news-blurb-friendly media like the Internet there are also more opportunities for third party advocate groups to spread their message as well, and this time it prompted the FDA to get food manufacturers to suspend the Smart Choices program. Will there ever be a point where the common good trumps marketing and profit? Probably not. But as long as there are people who are fighting to educate others using tools of skeptical and critical thinking, there is some hope that people can get information on making good choices for nutrition.

Energy Drinks...Huh?

I saw another ad on TV for an energy drink.

I kept wondering about energy drinks. See, when I think of ingesting something to get energy, I think about calories. But the energy drink being advertised was only 5 calories "per shot".

So the energy they give isn't really food energy. Instead, they are more akin to "alert" energy; basically the drinks are just stimulants, made from a mix of caffeine and sugar.

I did a little research on it. Not much in-depth, but just to get an idea of what's in these things. From this link, you can see some approximate amounts of caffeine in common drinks in milligrams per fluid ounce:
Brewed Coffee: 7 to 16
Instant Coffee: 9 to 14
Dr. Pepper in the US: 4.62
Expresso: 20 to 50
Tea: 5 to 6.33

Compare that to some common energy drinks:
AMP: 8.93
5-hour Energy: 40
Diet Pepsi Max: 5.75
Jolt Cola: 5.96
Mountain Dew MDX: 5.875
NOS: 16.25
Red Bull: 9.64

There are plenty of others but this small sample shows that there really isn't anything all that special about these drinks. They're glorified soda. Some have some herbal additives, but most studies I've run across have shown that herbal remedies are hardly worth more than marketing hype. From these tables it looks like the caffeine content, the primary reason these energy drinks are "energy" drinks, is easily rivaled by a strong tea or coffee. Turn the tea into a sweet tea and you have an energy drink for far less money.

I originally thought the energy drinks were a ripoff because they advertised energy without calories. After a skimming of materials on the subject, I see that even with drugs added energy drinks are more of a triumph of marketing over science. Making headlines by being banned in some countries were simply adding to the marketing engine.

In the end the only reason to drink energy drinks is because you like the taste. Otherwise it's just an overdose of caffeine, which probably isn't good for you anyway. Then again, this is America...

Tasty Fried Food

I avoid fried foods now. I've had a bite once in a great great while, but overall I avoid it simply because fried foods make me feel a little queasy (psychosomatic, maybe?), but fried foods aren't very good for you anyway.

One of my guilty post-op pleasures is following the This Is Why You're Fat site. Every day, a new culinary concoction. Such as this one which sounds intriguing and scary at the same time.

There's so many things that people have whipped up and posted. I admit I've made some oddball things in the past, but I don't think I've come up with things that these people do. I'll also admit that I've seen a couple of these things at county fairs and carnivals, though.

In case you never actually looked around the site the This Is Why You're Fat site is listed on the side panel of this blog. Every day. New scary food. Take a gander. Recoil in horror. I won't tell anyone that you secretly wondered what it would taste like.

Should You Fear the Hamburger?

This article is more than a little scary. It's nearly as long as my rambling posts, but if true, it certainly is informative.

The video on the site is especially scary.

The story has two facets; the human interest story focuses on young Stephanie Smith, a dance instructor who is now having to use a wheelchair, possibly for the rest of her life. Why? Because of the scary story. She ate a contaminated hamburger.

That's right. She ate a bad bit of hamburger and so she might never walk again.

Every day hundreds of thousands of burgers are eaten and the vast majority of people have no issues.

When there is an issue with food poisoning, it is rarely worse than your average flu. You end up with the crappers or stomach ache, maybe with a bit of yarking thrown in for good measure. You feel lousy for a couple days and that's it.

But this video is a reminder that there are two things you never want to see the process of being made; meats, and the law. This one only covers meat.

It runs through the industry standard lack of throughness in inspecting our meat supply and the lack of accountability in preventing outbreaks of illness. It's amazing to me that more people aren't sick from their food.

This story highlights how the hamburger you get in your grocery store is often mixed with cuts of fat and castoff, less than premium meats in order to cut costs. It isn't well inspected. It isn't cleaned thoroughly. The hamburger that made Stephanie sick was actually a mix of crud from Nebraska, Texas, Uruguay and South Dakota. Yes, one of those isn't a state in the continental US, for those of you that are geography challenged. The hamburger from your local grocer could very well be a mutt of varying pedigree and chances are you have no way of finding out.

We take it for granted how our food is handled. We just get this end product and assume that a cow went in one end of the slaughterhouse and the red matter came out the other side, gets packed, shipped to the store and we buy it. Not so! What you're getting is a fine mix of varying quality meats meant to mix meat with fats in a way that is the lowest cost to your producer.

Fast food, for all the artificial stuff added to the foods for preserving it and enhancing flavor, isn't immune to the good old poisonings. E. Coli first made mainstream headlines with the public with an outbreak from a Jack In The Box, going to prove the workers in the kitchen blowing their noses on the grills to watch it sizzle isn't the only danger lurking in fast food and also proving that there is indeed some "real" food mixed in with the fast frankenfoods.

I have to say that this story was a little frightening. My current habitual diet is comprised of sliced turkey and sliced ham; it's not a pressed or mixed meat like hamburger (and I'm desperately hoping that there's at least a slightly better margin of safety to those meats), but we did find out that the stuff we buy comes from one of the largest meat companies that also happened to be paying for this woman's medical expenses...Cargill.

Hippies and tree huggers and general nuts with berries on the brains like to be very vocal in their advocacy of organic, natural foods, and denouncing anything from a wrapper, be it fast food or stuff off the grocer's shelf, as being beyond evil for the temple of the body. There are so many claims of how horrible everything we ingest is that it's hard to know if this poisoning in meat is something to worry about or if it was a fluke, and I'm merely disgusted by the stripping of ignorance behind what brings the clean and abstract food from the grocery store to my plate.

We already hear, repeatedly, about the ways foods will kill you.

• chemicals added to fast food.
• saturated fats
• sugars and empty calories in cakes, cookies, brownies, etc.
• high fructose corn syrup.
• artificial flavors and enhancers
• high sodium and calories in restaurant foods
• pesticides lacing vegetables and fruits
• maximum allowance of generally considered non-food items...like, for example, insect parts...in peanut butter, cereals, etc.
• most of the mcnugget isn't meat. It's corn. Surprise!
• portion sizes are sky-high
• diet drinks may actually increase your weight
• mercury is found in seafood
• workers in restaurants and fast food joints have been known to take...liberties...with your order. Especially if you ticked them off in some way.
  
• etc, etc, etc...

Now there's the scary way our meat is actually not closely inspected between slaughter and dinner plate. You can't trust anything you didn't grow and prepare yourself. Unfortunately that's probably not feasible for most of us.

So...is this something to worry about? Or do we just keep living our lives in willful ignorance? Sometimes it really is true that ignorance is bliss.

Oh Wow...This Would Kill Healthy People

I have to admit, this sounds...compellingly...tempting to me.

Maybe I'm earning my time in the therapists chair as most sane people would probably say this is disgusting. Me...it's a huge chunk of the things that I miss. This is virtually every cakey dessert that I used to enjoy mashed into one.

Click the link. Go ahead. Take a look.

Yes, I've had bariatric surgery, and I struggle with emotional eating. I snack out on mixed nuts and now broccoli with mustard (don't ask...it's a taste I acquired back when I first was on a very low calorie diet) periodically to stave off both hungers and feeling wonky during my exercise sessions. I watch my weight as much as possible to try and make sure I keep losing weight.

This food looks great to me. It is a reminder of all the things I miss. But I can't try it. It would be a death sentence.

Okay, not a death sentence. But it would probably hurt. A lot. Or at least make me regret it.

But hey...I'm allowed to look and drool. What about you neurotypicals out there? What do you think of food like this? Click on the link and let me know!

Accuracy in Food Labeling

Here's a scary article for people that are actually trying to do the right thing in their diet.

I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise, though. Many government agencies are charged with a large set of duties and then find themselves understaffed and underfunded and apparently it includes the FDA. This leaves the patients in charge of the asylum, or in this case the food packagers and manufacturers are allowed to police themselves.

Essentially the article is talking about how food labels are often found to be inaccurate. Not just a few. This is saying that approximately 25% of labels are wrong. One in four!

From the article:
In testing in the past couple of years, Florida found:

• Sugar in sugar free coconut pies sold at Walmart.
• Sugar in sugar free syrup made by Walden Farms.
• More sodium than claimed in Orville Redenbacher Popcorn Cakes.
• Sugar in sugar free Hill & Valley Apple Walnut Muffins.
• Fat exceeding the labels claim in Publix whole wheat hamburger buns.
• More sugar than the labels claim in Sunsweet prune juice.

For people with diabetes or people who are post-surgery bariatric patients, the fact that sugar-free items are found to contain sugar is not exactly welcomed news. This may explain some of those "occasional" blood sugar test anomalies, though.

This is extremely disconcerting. There's the buzz I've grown accustomed to..."frankenfoods" (genetically modified foods) cause issues, frankenfoods are safer and cheaper, these oils and these additives are safe, wait, these oils will accumulate and kill you and these additives will give you arse cancer, high fructose corn syrup is safe, high fructose corn syrup will cause your genitals to fall off...blah blah.

Dieting is a matter of calories in, calories out. But wait! Eat these pills and you'll lose weight! Eat celery and you'll have NEGATIVE calories! Drink this, puree that, swallow some olive oil and the weight magically slips away! Try the Olestra and you'll see it's true!

Then there's disappointing news. I got that from reading labels. Those burgers have how many calories? And KFC has how much sodium? Holy schnikes...

Later I found articles about how much corn was really in our foods. Wonder how much corn was in a Chicken McNugget? A lot more than I thought there was. And of course how many manufacturers are benefiting from artificially inflated prices on sugar so they can profit from corn-derived additives like high fructose corn syrup.

Then there was the disconcerting. The calories on the label aren't accurate because calorimeters read the calories in the food, but the texture affects how we digest it, so we don't get all of it? That's where I discovered that if you eat 200 calories of peanuts versus 200 calories of peanut butter, you actually get closer to 200 calories from the peanut butter while some of the calories in the nuts aren't digested because...well, they don't digest as readily. For someone as tied to numbers and accuracy as I am, this was troublesome.

Now I find out that labels may be outrightly lying about what they contain.

This. Sucks.

It's hard enough for us to know what's in our food and how we should be eating. It's beginning to look more and more like the people that always came off as food extremist nuts, people who advocate eating nothing but what you dig out of your backyard garden or raise from an egg in a coop lest the evil corporations poison you without your knowledge.

Sadly it's getting easier and easier to believe them.

Best Thing Since Fried Butter

Well, actually it is fried butter. Click the link to check it out.

Comes in different flavors. You might think this is crazy...well, I'm not so sure.

• It's a pat of butter. I don't know how many you get served, but it's one pat of butter rolled in a dough. Probably less calories than (or on par with) your average restaurant dinner roll. With a pat of butter.
• It joins the ranks of fried Oreos, twinkies, Coke, pickles, Snickers, Gummi Bears...basically anything that can be dipped in batter and stuck into a fryer.

One or two pats of butter isn't going to kill you. I probably can't have it since I don't know what the surgery effect would be with such greasy fried goo and I'd rather not end up doing Chunk's Truffle Shuffle at a fairground or even around the house. I'm thinking that even if I asked my surgeon or doctor about it they'll tell me it'll put me in the hospital if it means keeping me from even being tempted by a doughy buttery pat of love.

Still...tempting to think about it. Is it as bad or as good as it sounds like it could be? In my mind it could go either way. I thought the same thing about fried Coke but it seems to be selling somewhere...(Insert smiles here)